Mass Firing of Probationary Federal Employees Was Illegal, Judge Rules

A federal judge late Friday ruled that the Trump administration’s mass firing of probationary employees earlier this year was illegal, a victory for the labor unions and nonprofit groups that had sued the government over the terminations.

The ruling did not call on the government to return the fired probationary employees to their jobs, as would be the “ordinary course,” Judge William H. Alsup of the Northern District of California wrote in a 38-page opinion. Because the Supreme Court allowed the administration to continue its purge for months while the case proceeded, he said, “too much water has now passed under the bridge.”

Many of the fired probationary workers in the 17 agencies covered in the lawsuit have been reinstated to their posts, have found new jobs or do not want to return to their old jobs, Judge Alsup said. And for some workers, agency reorganizations over the past few months have eliminated their positions.

Even so, the plaintiffs saw the ruling as a significant win.

“Judge Alsup’s decision makes clear that thousands of probationary workers were wrongfully fired, exposes the sham record the government relied upon, and requires the government to tell the wrongly terminated employees that O.P.M.’s reasoning for firing them was false,” Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement on Saturday, using an acronym for the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm.

The agency took a leading role in the Trump administration’s early downsizing efforts led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Judge Alsup found the terminations illegal because they came at the direction of the personnel office and not the agencies where the employees worked, which hold the authority to hire and fire.

He ordered that the personnel office be prohibited from firing federal employees the way it had done earlier this year.

The probationary firings were part of a series of federal worker termination programs launched by the Trump administration, all of which face legal challenges. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit recently ruled that a Maryland case challenging the probationary firings should be sent back to the district court and dismissed, because the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue.

In Friday’s opinion, Judge Alsup chided the administration over its conduct in the monthslong case. He said the government’s evidence was a “sham” that included documents unrelated to the case, leaving a reader “with the feeling that he is being led, blindfolded, along a carefully plotted path through a dense, unseen wood.”

“Here and there, he may hear a rustle in the trees, feel the dark silhouette of a towering form or intuit some other hint at the forest beyond. But never is he afforded an unfettered view of the landscape through which he passes,” Judge Alsup wrote. In some cases, he said, the government offered “fabricated” context and “ersatz” evidence. He called some prosecutor conduct “chicanery,” echoing observations he had shared at times during the case.

He appeared particularly angered by the government’s insistence that the fired workers had ways outside of district courts to challenge their dismissals. Mr. Trump effectively disabled those options when he fired people in key positions, Judge Alsup noted.

The judge singled out the Federal Labor Relations Authority, an independent board that reviews unfair labor practices. Mr. Trump fired the chair of the board, significantly slowing its work. Mr. Trump also fired a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, where many of the probationary employees turned to challenge their firings. That left the panel without a quorum and unable to make decisions. And the president fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which protects whistle-blowers, installing a loyalist in his place.

Judge Alsup ordered 17 agencies to issue letters to each fired probationary worker stating: “You were not terminated on the basis of your personal performance.”

When he issued a similar order earlier this year, some agencies complied but included legal language that the government did not agree with the court’s opinion. Judge Alsup said the agencies were free to disagree with his opinion and appeal the ruling, but that the letters were “not an appropriate medium for the litigation of those disagreements.”